Improving the Effectiveness of Configural Displays through Mapped Emergent Features and Color-Coded Graphical Elements

When completing tasks in complex, dynamic domains individuals must consider both high-level issues (e.g., relationships among several variables) and low-level data (e.g., the values of individual variables). An important issue in display design is to determine those graphic forms that allow the efficient extraction of information at both levels. One display that has the potential to achieve these dual design goals is the configural (object) display. Research on configural displays has indicated that this type of display will facilitate the extraction of information about high-level issues if the emergent features directly correspond to the critical data relationships that exist in a domain. On the other hand, designing configural displays to offset the cost that is usually associated with the extraction of low-level data has proven to be more difficult. One potential design strategy to accomplish this is to increase the perceptual salience of the lower-level display elements and color-coding is one technique to acheive this. Performance for color-coded configural and separate displays was compared in two empirical investigations. For the extraction of information regarding high-level issues the configural display significantly increased accuracy with no cost in latency. For the extraction of low-level data there were no differences between the configural and separate display for accuracy, but there was a significant decrement in latency associated with the configural display. However, the results indicate that this decrement in performance dissipates with experience, and under certain conditions was not significant.